Model of the human nose reveals first steps of SARS-CoV-2 and RSV infection
Feb 2022, phys.org
I used to think it was a big deal that we knew how to grow diamonds in a laboratory. But then we started to grow organs. Intestines, kidneys, lungs, brains (pictured above) and now noses.
They made a nose from scratch, using nose epithelial cells swabbed from somebody's nose, and placed on a substrate designed to enable them to interact as they normally would with the environment. (For this study, they were adding to that environment SARS-CoV-2 and RSV virions.) We could then call this an artificial nose, although that might be misleading. It's not full-blown olfaction, but it's a step.
via Baylor College of Medicine: Anubama Rajan et al, The Human Nose Organoid Respiratory Virus Model: an Ex Vivo Human Challenge Model To Study Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Pathogenesis and Evaluate Therapeutics, mBio (2022). DOI: 10.1128/mbio.03511-21
Image credit: This is a human brain organoid, from the National Institutes of Health, circa 2021.
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